I Can Bake a Cherry Pie

Click on the photo. (By the way, this is not my pie, this is some anonymous internet pie--my pie looks more golden and less red. Also, I didn't bother with a lattice top, I just did a plain old double crust)

Yesterday, I went to my friend M's house to help her pick her sour cherry tree clean, before the bugs get them all or the cherries fall to the ground in a scattered rotted mess. She graciously let me have some cherries, so today I made a cherry pie.

My Grandmother, who loved ginger and chestnuts and marzipan, would have loved this pie too--cherry was her favorite.

Can you bake a cherry pie?

Butterflies are Free!

As a family, we've found that there is almost nothing as exciting as picking a milkweed leaf that has a milky white monarch caterpillar egg on it, watching it hatch and become a very, very hungry caterpillar--Eric Carle was not exaggerating.

We only have a few milkweed plants, but they will reseed and we will get more every year.

After we had one caterpillar turn into a butterfly in a little plastic box, we realized that we needed something bigger. My husband built a big butterfly nursery/habitat/enclosure/ranch where the newly hatched caterpillars can feast until they'll climb up the side, attach a pad of sticky silk to the top, hang on, and each turn themselves into a chrysalis.

My daughter is enjoying watching the caterpillars develop almost as much as I am.

Do you know that caterpillars have about 4,000 muscles? Or that they, as other insects do, breathe out of the sides of their bodies?

Do you know what happens when a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis? It melts...basically. Monarchs' bodies dissolve into a protein rich goo where certain cells develop into different butterfly parts until they're fully cooked. And then they come out. Isn't that mind blowingly amazing?! My kids wonder if their little butterfly mind has any memory of their caterpillar existence and we all came to the conclusion that they don't. It made my kids kind of sad, as if when they become adults they'd forget their childhood. Except they won't magically melt at 18 and then all of a sudden know how to balance a check book.

The butterfly emerged!

Here, you see the butterfly resting on the clear shell of its chrysalis.

We all got a chance to carefully hold it.


We put it on the table to rest a little and it clung to the edge.

My kids got a chance to look at it up close.

We let it crawl up on a stick.

Isn't it beautiful? Its black is like velvet and it's antennae are elegant and long.

My son was looking at the butterfly on the stick and got it a little too close to his head. Oops.

We're fairly certain that the nitrogenous waste that dripped down into my son's left eye is not injurious and only had some gross out factor as if it were pee, which it was not. My son and his eye are both OK.

We are really enjoying being able to watch the whole process of transition from egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and then amazing, beautiful butterfly. Right now we have three really big caterpillars and three teeny, tiny ones. I've discovered that I have to have a little separate nursery for the wee ones, because the voracious older ones will eat up all of the leaf, and then I don't know where the little ones are.

I'll do another butterfly post once the three bigger caterpillars become chrysalis and you can see the green gems with tiny gold dots hanging from the top of the butterfly enclosure.

If you can get yourself some milkweed and grow it in your yard, it is an amazing treat to see all of this unfold. In keeping with the compact, it's also good to note that butterflies are free! Both ways...

Two Words

Sleepovers rock...

That's so Hawt!! or One Thing Leads to Another

Paris Hilton, posing and looking hawt.

Paris is hawt. She wears hawt things that are girly and at the same time oh so sexy--that's just so hawt. But, is she as hot as lava? No!! Is she as hot as a laser cutter? No. What about lightning or the surface of the sun? No. Hawt, but not hot really.

How do we know all of that? Maybe she is as hot as a laser cutter. Maybe she is like lightning. We shouldn't be hatin' like that. It's not nice to prejudge even with seemingly obvious targets like Paris. Well, we know because we just looked up the relative temperatures after watching some inspiring volcano eruption videos. Those led to a series of Mount St. Helen eruptions which led to a conversation about pressure and force and the knocking down of forests and buildings and volcanoes' ability to create new land.

My daughter said that a volcano can create new land and then knock it down. Yep.

How hot is lava? It ranges from 700 degrees celsius to 1200 degrees celsius. OK, but how hot is the core of the earth? It's around 5,000 or 6,000 degrees celsius. Is a laser cutter that can cut through steel hotter than lava? Good question son, let's find out. Mild steel (and what is that exactly?) melts at 1515 degrees celsius, so a laser cutter IS hotter than lava. Wow.

What about lightning? That has to be pretty hot. Yes, it is very hot, in fact hotter than the surface of the sun. Say what? Yes. Really. The sun is 6,000 degrees celsius and a lightning strike is 30,000 celsius. Wow again. How do people survive a lightning strike? It's amazing and lucky that they do. How do things not catch on fire every time they are struck with lightning?

I didn't discuss the hawtness of Paris Hilton with my kids--just the hotness of the sun, lightning, lava, the earth's core and laser cutters. My kids don't know about hawt, just hot.

What have your kids learned recently? Where did your conversations lead you? And what do you think is hot, or hawt?